By Joseph Bryant Rotherham

Book Review by Robert Guenther
Mr. Oscar Baker, founding editor of Truth for Today, often carried with him a Bible which he highly recommended. It was the entitled the Rotherham Emphasized Bible.

This Bible was translated by Mr. Joseph Bryant Rotherham. Mr. Rotherham was born circa 1828, in New Buckenham, Norfolk, England. His parents were Wesleyan Methodists and he was himself ordained to the Methodist ministry in 1852, at the age of 24. He spent many years as an itinerant evangelist, traveling throughout Great Britain. The crowning achievement of his career was The Emphasized Bible. He died in 1910 at the age of 82.

In this translation he attempts to show the reader each point that needs to be emphasized in every passage of scripture. The student can then readily see where the weight should be. This is done by the use of indentations, brackets, apostrophes, bars, double bars, and varieties of type. This text is a translation, not a paraphrase. A good example of how close this is to the original is in Genesis 3:4:

"And the serpent said to the woman - ye shall not die. For God doth know, that < in the day you eat there of > then shall your eyes be open, and ye shall become like God, knowing good and evil."

In this passage, we can see that the word surely is missing as it should be since it was not in the original text. We can also note the different indentations used for this verse. The whole of the Bible is written in this form, and the indentations serve the following purposes:

1. To mark a transition from Narrative to Speech.
2. To mark the presence of Speech within Speech.
3. To emphasize Poetic Parallelism.
4. To present the results of Logical Analysis.

There are also sections headings, the author's own thoughts in a short summary form that explains each section; footnotes identified by lower case letters; references; appendices, and the authors guide to abbreviations to further aid that serious student in his or her studies.

For all practical purposes we can say that the original scriptures were written in the Hebrew and Greek language. The text that Mr. Rotherham chose to use for his translation of the Old Testament was the Critico-Massoretic Hebrew Bible, by Dr. C. D. Ginsburg.

The text for the New Testament translation was that of Dr. Wescott and Dr. Holt. He chose these texts because they were the latest.